“Eating your own dog food” is the tech and software equivalent of putting your money where your mouth is ‒ it’s about using your own products for testing and promotion. We at Kenshoo adhere to this methodology by supporting our very own paid media program and utilizing the Kenshoo Infinity Suite to power and optimize our campaigns.

As the Manager of Demand Gen and Marketing Operations at Kenshoo, part of my role is to drive the process and strategy of global advertising and demand generation. This has provided me with the opportunity to become more hands-on with our platform.

Today, I’m kicking off a blog series that gives you more insight into Kenshoo’s very own paid media program where I’ll touch on our strategy and implementation, some of our key findings, and finally the results we’ve been able to generate. We’re sharing this with the hope that you and your organization can take away some best practices to apply to your program.

To start us off, let’s dial it back to when Kenshoo first implemented our campaigns. We stepped back and looked at our program as we would our clients’ ‒ first, by understanding our topline goals:

Brand Awareness

Demand Generation

Sales Support

As a marketer yourself, I’m sure you don’t find these to be entirely different than the goals of your organization. Digging a layer deeper, the next step was to understand which publishers, channels, and ad types we could leverage to best help us reach these business goals. As a leader in the digital marketing space, we know there is value in diversifying our efforts across channels and publishers and testing out new ad types, and as such, we have strived to do so with our program by including both search and social channels as well as a variety of publishers such as Bing, Google, Instagram, and Facebook.

After deciding to diversify our media outlets, the next step was to develop messaging and targeting that would accomplish the following: drive traffic to our website, generate engagement with our site and our content, and promote our brand and thought leadership. Collaborating with our creative, content, and demand generation teams we were able to launch ads to accomplish these goals and continue to iterate based on performance.

A few things we’ve learned since launching our program is that goals can change and new campaigns can arise that need paid promotional support, so having a platform that allows us to pivot easily is ideal. Kenshoo’s cross-channel and cross-publisher capabilities take the manual creation and management of campaigns out of the picture, saving us time and allowing us to focus our efforts on other strategic projects.

Stay tuned for more details on Kenshoo’s paid media program in my next post where you’ll get to know the nuts and bolts of our campaign structure and see the best practices we learned.